Autopilot Launches CoPilot Sales Automation Tool

0

Any startup worth its salt these days built a mailing list from before it even launched, but what do you do after that? How do you identify the best leads from all of those random people who signed up for your service? Fresh off its $10 million Series B funding round, marketing automation service Autopilot today announced the launch of its CoPilot email sales automation tool, which aims to make it easy for companies to find and engage their prospects with the help of automated email flows

While it uses much of the same technology as Autopilot, CoPilot is geared towards salespeople and not marketers, says CEO and co-founder Michael Sharkey, who founded the company together with his brothers Peter and Chris. He argues that the worlds of marketing and sales technologies are starting to converge. Right now, “in one corner marketing has marketing automation, in another corner sales has CRM,” he said. “But there is this third corner where sales development representatives live and that’s who CoPilot focuses on.”

The service aims to remove all of the manual tasks that sales development teams often spend much of their days on and automatically engages prospective clients through automated outbound campaigns. Ideally, thanks to automating most of the prospecting steps, the first time a sales person actually has a conversation with a potential client, it’ll be about getting a deal done, Sharkey tells me.

Those campaigns can be tweaked based on a client’s behavior, and CoPilot automates follow-ups based on the recipient’s actions. The service also provides sales teams with a real-time feed of a prospect’s actions from within the email.

Unsurprisingly, CoPilot is integrated with Autopilot’s Prospect Ace, which allows companies to verify their email lists using social profiles. The service also allows companies to import their existing lists using CSV files. The team tells me the service is also integrated with Salesforce Sync, and the plan is to add more solutions and data providers directly over time, so users won’t need to rely on CSV files.